January 30, 2004

Long Distance Debugging

During one window, we're running a script on the vehicle to tell us which piece of software in the system is causing that reset problem. We've tried that for two days, but so far haven't been successful.

In another, we're trying to dump parts of the 224-MB flash file system back down to Earth, so we can reconstruct the system here. But think about it -- on a good day, we can only transmit less than 5 MB, so moving the whole file means a lot of days with no additional science. We'd prefer to avoid that path, but it's a contingency plan.

In that third window, we try to communicate with the orbiter.

Since we can bring up the system in “cripple mode,” we're doing integrity checks manually. But this takes a lot of time, because we like to do them one by one, in order.

We can't waste any effort, or time. You could say our dialup service is really, really, really slow. It takes forever to get anything back and forth.

January 29, 2004

The Ideal OS X IDE for Lisp

Brian Mastenbrook has started the mac-lisp-ide mailing list, “to encourage discussion about what a true, native Mac OS X ide for Common Lisp development would look and feel like, and to encourage the coding of such an IDE.”

January 19, 2004

You've Got 5 Seconds... And 3 Are Up.

Last night I was at Versailles for my friend Jill's birthday party when Steven Seagal walked in. I have to imagine that later, after we'd finished dinner, when the waiters turned down the lights and filed out and sing Happy Birthday to Jill, Steven watched, silent and contemplative, hands in their signature pose, until when all the other diners in the restaurant applauded, his inner peace at Jill's having been born finally allowed him to draw his hands apart slowly, inevitably, and then strike them against each other in a single clap that resounded in the spirits of those nearby.

Also, the trained midget that accompanied Tim Robbins to Coach & Horses after his show at the Knitting Factory hit on my girlfriend in a creepy-but-humorous-just-because-he's-a-midget-oh-wait-no-it's-creepy-again-yes-because-he's-a-midget way a couple nights before that.

January 17, 2004

Erotic Museum

Went to the Erotic Museum in Hollywood last night, which was its opening night. I liked the ancient ASCII porn, presented on fresh greenbar (“All these images were labeled 'adult'—even the innocuous William Shatner”, and the collection of graphics from Japanese Mah Jongg video games.

They also showed a pretty steamy film from the 40s, purportedly of Marilyn Monroe. All I can say is, take two naked people, put them together, and it doesn't matter whether it's 2004 or 1946, they do exactly the same things with each other.

I totally put my hands into a glovebox that I shouldn't have, though (they had a glovebox so you could play with various things without worrying about uh, germs; that's some canny presentation).

“I know at last what distinguishes man from animals - financial worries.” - Romain Rolland
“Hard work has made it easy. That is my secret. That is why I win.” - Nadia Comaneci
“Some defeats are installments to victory.” -Jacob Riis

January 14, 2004

25th Anniversary Survival Research Laboratories Show

Viva Las Vegas Survival Research Laboratories Celebrates 25 Years!
SRL was conceived and founded by Mark Pauline in 1978 as an organization of
creative technicians dedicated to redirecting the techniques, tools, and tenets
of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations
in practicality, product, or warfare.

ASDF-INSTALL

It started life as an SBCL contrib, but Edi Weitz has ported it to CMUCL, CLISP,
AllegroCL, and LispWorks, and Marco Baringer has added support for OpenMCL (the code is currently available on Edi's server).

January 12, 2004

The Best Open Source Lisp

In a way, this is in line with my opinion, which is that there is currently no open source lisp that is even “good”, in comparison to the commercial versions. There are a couple open source lisps that are making a lot of progress and seem to be strongly positioned for future greatness, but they're not there yet.

January 09, 2004

Movitz

an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp that targets the ubiquitous x86 PC architecture "on the metal". That is, running without any operating system or other form of software environment. Movitz is a development platform for operating system kernels, embedded, and single-purpose applications.

Planet Lisp

Less than 24 hours after I read this post by Edd Dumbill about various projects' sort of meta-rss pages and wondered on #lisp whether there were enough lisp-related news sources and weblogs to support something similar, Xach Beane went and implemented Planet Lisp.

January 06, 2004

CL-SDL for OpenMCL

I spent some hours installing and debugging and I am very happy to say that CL-SDL is finally working on OpenMCL. This was kind of easy, most of the hard work has been done by Matthew as the code is very clean and very portable. There is still need some work to make a usable distribution. You can see it by looking at the attached screenshots. Animations are smooth (obviously, there are not many objects on screen !), but event-loop is not working yet (keyboard, mouse, etc.).

MER

I was watching NASA TV last night as the MER got to Mars. When it hit the surface and started bouncing, and then NASA lost the signal from the lander and a few seconds later the NASA TV stream died, I thought that was going to be the end. I'm glad I was wrong.

Maas Digital has a pretty slick, but apparently relatively accurate animation covering the rover, from launch to creeping around the surface of Mars (if you have a serious interest, you'll want this torrent of the 320 MB DVD-quality version).

Chalres Elatchi:About that question what would you say to your congressman? I just got word from our web people in last 24 hours, 460 million hits. It's a world record, even more than Olympics... shows you how much interest there's been in this mission. And this is only weekend, wait till Monday when people get to work with high speed access.

GhettoHost

January 04, 2004

2004

I spent new year's eve at the CLUI party. Pretty drunken. The next day Lori and Jeff and I put in four hours at Jerry's Deli, where we underwent a highly experimental egg burger & banana split transfusion.

ILISP vs. SLIME

January 03, 2004

25 DARPA Grand Challenge Teams Selected

After quarreling between DARPA, some big well-funded teams, and some of the smaller teams and hobbyists, the 25 teams who will be competing in the DARPA autonomous ground vehicle Grand Challenge have been chosen [via wmf].

A quote from the Register article:

These talented participants will bring fresh thinking to autonomous ground vehicle technology for national defense. I am confident that our warfighters will benefit in the coming years from the technologies that these teams will be fielding in the Grand Challenge.

Make no mistake, this is a military project. I know at least one person who quit working on a team for moral reasons.

(Apparently the International Robot Racing Federation is going to hold a clone of the Grand Challenge competition, complete with $1 million prize. Sponsorship by community colleges and coverage by Art Bell makes me a little skeptical about this.)

January 02, 2004

More Hackers and Painters

What's the book about? Big new ideas emanating from the world of computers: open source, startups, Web-based applications, the programming language renaissance, spam filtering, digital design, nerds, free speech online.

Many of the big new ideas at the moment are connected with computers. Our field is hot now, and like a hot object it's radiating ideas into other fields. Fields that have nothing intrinsically to do with computers-- law, accounting, architecture, music-- tend to be changing fastest at the point where they and computers meet.